I always find the process of writing out of order fascinating and baffling. I'm the sort who can't skip ahead at all or else I totally lose the desire to go back and fill in the bits between the key frames, so to speak.
So, double question: which parts of TVD were at least sketched out first? Is that determined by motivation, and if so how do you keep the discipline to fill in the rest?
Hah, well, funnily enough to me writing chronologically seems like the more disciplined option, actually, while mine is the weird inefficient and time-consuming cop-out. But it's the only way that works for me, honestly. I think in all the writing I've done I've only had like maybe two or three fics that I wrote entirely chronologically, and even then they were short pieces.
And I'd say it's less about motivation than inspiration, honestly. I've got someone in my asks asking me about my writing process and I still intend to reply to that fully, so I won't go into too much detail, but generally... I have the general idea of a story, I let that percolate in the back of my mind, and basically every time I get any idea for a scene (a song that inspires me, a TV show/movie/book scene, playing around my mental playground just before sleep or on my commute) I write it down in quick-draft version. Eventually I have enough bits and bobs to have the bare structure of a story, and then whenever I have a few hours free, I start at the top and fill in the bits that are missing. And in a way, that feels more like walking along with the story than having to build it from nothing. It's what the great late Terry Pratchett apparently called the Valley of Clouds technique, which encapsulates perfectly what it's like for me:
"Youāre at the edge of the valley, and there is a church steeple, and there is a tree, and there is a rocky outcrop, but the rest of it is mist. But you know that because they exist, there must be ways of getting from one to the other that you cannot see. And so you start the journey. And when I write, I write a draft entirely for myself, just to walk the valley and find out what the book is going to be all about.ā"
Mind you, it is still hard work, and there's a lot of sort of redundancies because scenes need to be adapted, moved around, rewritten, and you often end up accidentally writing the same kind of scene twice, so a lot ends up in the trash bin... But when it goes well it's pretty fun, because you're basically telling yourself the story.
As for your first question: Out of curiosity, I went through my 13 year old drafts and found the original doc I think I sent to my then-beta, and it's very funny to see how much has changed and how much hasn't.
Either way, here's TVD-the bare bones version:
shootout with Seb finding the diamond cufflink
first meeting Jim when he's pretending to be a clerk and Seb gets shot
That one scene where Jim shows up again playing-pretend and threatening someone and Seb gets turned on while being on guard duty
getting picked up post-shoot-out in Epping forest and the handsy sadismpatch-up job afterwards
Jim threatening Seb in his own flat after ignoring Jim's orders
first handjob
the big damn kinky sex scene
waking up the morning after the big damn kinky sex scene
first time seeing sherlock's file after flying back home from a job
seeing John for the first time with the german hackers
Jim concocting his big plan while Bach is playing
the drunk bet in Switzerland (at the time of writing not yet set in Switzerland)
Jim's post-torture break down (would you miss me? & dies irea)
and funnily enough: the ending four lines (all tales end - the sound of a gunshot)
